I was 16, and it was the spring of 1956. I remember the new leaves were beginning to sprout on the elm trees near where we lived in Oklahoma. I recall how happy we were that the road outside our home had finally been paved – it was now a lot quieter when cars drove past (and less dusty, too). And I remember that the high-school ‘sock hop’ dances had begun, where DJs played Elvis Presley’s first hit ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. But what I remember most from that spring was my first unsettling encounter with the impossible.
It started with a game. My friends and I decided to play hide-and-seek on our bicycles. One of us rode off to hide and, after some time, the rest fanned out throughout the neighbourhood trying to find him. This was in a small town on the northwest edge of Oklahoma City, which consisted mainly of small suburban homes with fenced yards, car garages and sheds, as well as trees and bushes that provided ideal camouflage. It didn’t take long until we decided that searching was hopeless: there were just too many places where he could be hiding. We gave up. But while riding back, an image appeared in my mind’s eye: I saw our quarry laying down his bicycle in the front yard of my house. We couldn’t have seen this directly because the yard was blocked by other houses. And yet, as we rounded the corner, I saw exactly what I’d pictured: our friend laying down his bicycle in the grass. I had seen it before seeing it – and in exquisite detail!
This experience, and others like it, contradicted everything I thought I knew about how reality functions and launched me on a quest that continues to the present day. At first, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, no one around me had any idea what I was talking about when I tried to explain these experiences. It wasn’t until 1970, while at the library of the National Institutes of Health near Washington, DC, that I finally found a knowledgeable librarian who knew that such experiences are called déjà vu, a French phrase meaning ‘already seen’. I learned that many others had had similar impossible experiences, too. I was not alone. This whetted my appetite. But my discovery of déjà vu led only to more questions. The deeper I delved, the more complex it became. ‘Déjà vu’ was not one thing. In fact, it was a better understood as a variety of experiences: ‘déjà experiences’.
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